Sense Absorbs $14M to Monitor Appliances, Power Home Automation

organizations that can help distribute its products more widely, Phillips says. Utilities, for example, might offer Sense products to customers as part of a program that rewards them for conserving energy. Insurance companies might be interested in Sense’s potential to warn of problems like electrical sparks that could start a fire in the home or a malfunctioning sump pump that might flood the basement.

Sense has also added the capability of tracking solar panel activity, both the amount of energy stored in the solar cells and how much gets used, Phillips says.

And eventually, once most machines in the home get hooked up to the Internet and there are standard software protocols for linking them all together, Sense will be able to tie into that system and expand the capabilities of its products, Phillips says.

“As [application programming interfaces] become available and there’s more smart home devices on the market, we will start to add control and automation to this platform,” Phillips says.

Until then, he likes where Sense sits. “The whole smart home world is predicated on intelligence in the home. You can’t do very much until you have the data.”

[Disclosure: Mike Phillips is the brother-in-law of Xconomy Boston editor Greg Huang. Mr. Huang was not involved in the planning, directing, reporting, or editing of this story.]